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Aaron Copland Biography Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, of Lithuanian Jewish descent. His father's surname was "Kaplan" before he anglicized it to "Copland" while in England, before emigrating to the United States. He spent his childhood living above his parents' Brooklyn shop. Although his parents never encouraged or directly exposed him to music, at the age of 15 he had already taken an interest in the subject and aspired to be a composer. His musical education included time with Leopold Wolfsohn, Rubin Goldmark (also one of George Gershwin's teachers), and Nadia Boulanger at the Fontainebleau School of Music in Paris from 1921 to 1924. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1925 and again in 1926. Upon his return from his studies in Paris, he decided that he wanted to write works that were "American in character" and thus he chose jazz as the American idiom. His first significant work was the necromantic ballet Grohg which contributed thematic material to his later Dance Symphony. Other major works of his first (austere) period include the Short Symphony (1933), Music for Theater (1925) and the Piano Variations (1930). However, this jazz-inspired period was brief, as his style evolved toward the goal of writing more accessible works. Many composers rejected the notion of writing music for the elite during the Depression, thus the common American folklore served as the basis for his work along with revival hymns, and cowboy and folk songs. At a time when conservatories were teaching more astringent methods of composition, Copland held onto the respect of academics with the reasonable statement that he wanted to see if he couldn't say what he had to say in the simplest possible terms. His second (vernacular) period began around 1936 with Billy the Kid and El Salon Mexico. Fanfare for the Common Man, perhaps Copland's most famous work, scored for brass and percussion, was written in 1942 at the request of the conductor Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. It would later be used to open many Democratic National Conventions. The fanfare was also used as the main theme of the fourth movement of Copland's Third Symphony, where it first appears in a quiet, pastoral manner, then in the brassier form of the original. The same year Copland wrote A Lincoln Portrait which became popular with the wider public, leading to a strengthening of his association with American music. He was commissioned to write a ballet, Appalachian Spring, which later he arranged as a popular orchestral suite. The ballet Rodeo, a tale of a ranch wedding, written around the same time as Lincoln Portrait (1942) is another enduring composition for Copland, and the "Hoe-Down" from the ballet is one of the most wellknown compositions by any American composer, having been used numerous times in movies and on television. In the early- to mid-1990s, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association used "Hoe-Down" as the background music to their "Beef, it's what's for dinner" marketing campaign, and it was also used during the 78th Academy Awards as background music. Copland composed three numbered symphonies, but applied the word "symphony" to more works than that. He rewrote his early three-movement "Organ Symphony" to leave out the organ part, calling the result his First Symphony. His fifteenminute "Short Symphony" was the Second Symphony, though it also exists as the "Sextet." The Third Symphony is more traditional in form (four movements of which the second is a scherzo and the third is an adagio) and length (approximately forty-five minutes). That leaves the "Dance Symphony," which Copland had hurriedly extracted from the early unproduced ballet "Grohg" in order to meet a commission from RCA Records. Copland was an important contributor to the genre of film music; his score for William Wyler's The Heiress (1949) won an Academy Award. Several of the themes he created are encapsulated in the suite Music for Movies, and his score for the film of Steinbeck's novel The Red Pony was given a suite of its own. This suite was one of Copland's own favorite scores. Posthumously, his music was used to score Spike Lee's 1998 film, He Got Game, which included a basketball game in a neighborhood court being set to Hoe-Down. It is difficult to overestimate the influence Copland has had on film scores. Virtually every composer who wrote scores for western movies, especially between 1940 and 1960, was influenced by Copland's style. Having defended the Communist Party USA during the 1936 presidential election, Copland was investigated by the FBI during the red scare of the 1950s. He was blacklisted, and in 1953 "A Lincoln Portrait" was pulled from President Eisenhower's inaugural concert due to the political climate. That same year Copland testified before Congress that he was never a Communist. The accusation outraged many members of the musical community, who claimed Copland's patriotism was clearly displayed through his music. The investigation ceased to be active in 1955 and was closed in 1975. Copland was never shown to be a member of the Communist Party. A friend of the late Leonard Bernstein, Copland exerted a major influence on Bernstein's composing style. Bernstein was considered the finest conductor of Copland's works. British progressive rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer recorded two songs based on Copland works: "Fanfare for the Common Man" and "Hoe-Down." Several of their live recordings of "Fanfare for the Common Man" incorporated the closing of the second movement of Copland's Third Symphony as well. Copland died in North Tarrytown, New York (now Sleepy Hollow), on December 2, 1990. Copland won the Pulitzer Prize in composition for "Appalachian Spring." In 2007, he will be inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame. He is also a past recipient (1970) of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia's distinguished Charles E. Lutton Man of Music Award.